In an interview with The Players’ Tribune, Lamar Odom opened up about the choices that he made in his life to get him to the point that he “shook hands with death.”
He recalled how, in October 2015, he woke up in the hospital after having had 12 strokes and 2 heart attacks.
“At some point, the main doctor came in and told me what had happened,” Odom wrote. “He said, ‘Mr. Odom, you’ve been in a coma for the last four days. Do you understand?’ I couldn’t talk. So I just nodded. He said, ‘It’s a miracle that you’re here. We didn’t think you were going to make it.'”
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He said that it was the first time in his life that he had felt truly helpless, but he knew that he had no one to blame but himself.
“At that point in my life, I was doing coke every day. Pretty much every second of free time that I had, I was doing coke. I couldn’t control it,” Odom wrote.
Since that time, he has taken responsibility for his mistakes, and he said that he is still struggling against his demons, but he’s clean now.
“I shook hands with death. But you know what? Ain’t no coming back from that,” he wrote.
“Even though my funeral would probably be a good funeral, and there’d probably be a lot of people who hadn’t seen each other in a long time. But it ain’t time for that yet. … I still got my kids. I’m still here. And damn, I’m still pretty handsome.”